Aug 28, 2013

WALK WITH TIME

WALK
WITH TIME

Khaliqur
Rahman

Walk
with Time and Time walks with you. Time most often passes those who don’t know
how to pass time in positive and useful ways. If you choose to have a fight and
quarrel against Time, you have already chosen to lose and lose badly. Failing
to plan is in fact planning to fail. Haven’t you heard this in an ad on the tv?
If you choose to kill time, Time is quicker to kill you first.

Everyone
says Time is all powerful, yet most of us take on time to fight against, as if
to win. Those, who’ve realised Time is all powerful, choose to walk with Time.
It is always advantageous to walk with power.

Nowadays,
students are taking examinations. No wonder, most of them are burning the
midnight oil. They’re turning their nights into days. They don’t know, and God
forbid, Time can change their days into nights as Time did in the case of
Milton. Time can be mercilessly cruel and revengeful.

Twenty
four hours in a cycle are more than enough. It is better to strike a balance
between work and rest. Balanced people sleep and rest for eight hours so that
they can work for eight hours with freshness and intensity. They still have
eight hours. They call these eight hours their private and personal time and
use it for maintenance and enhancement. They need to wash and take bath before
they eat and drink. They need to go to the club and recreate themselves and
they do keep in their schedule enough time for prayers and spiritual practices
to energise themselves. They watch telly and gossip, too. Balanced and wise
people do have a fitness programme. They have time for everything and do
everything in time.

Thus
the healthy slots for sleep and rest and for personal time bring them fully
charged for work and an ideal cycle goes round and round and they go a long way
in the marathon of life.

Disciplined
people keep an honest account of time as they do of money. They know that money
goes and comes back. But Time goes and doesn’t ever come back! Life has no
second innings!

It
sounds simple. But most people find it very difficult. We take a late and lazy
start on Sunday. Hi-hello goes on till late in the night and soon it is the
proverbial Monday Morning! Nature is regular and periodic. We are irregular and
aperiodic. That starts the trouble.

Jo saath na dey waqt ka
wo band gharee hai (a watch,not running, doesn’t keep time), said
an Urdu poet. Our watches have either stopped or run shamelessly late,
particularly when we have to ‘give’. The chief guests and the borrowers come
late to ‘give’ a lecture or money. We go late to ‘give’ our duties but arrive
early to ‘take’ salaries. Most students are neither ‘takers’ nor ‘givers’. They
blindly follow the fashion of the day in getting late. At least here they
follow their elders.

The
trains are late. The flights are delayed, even cancelled. The passengers for a
change are at the receiver’s end. Most clerks, officers and teachers are either
most often late or shirk work. The academic sessions are late. The examinations
are late. The results are late. The wedding parties are late. The mail posts
are late. Even speed posts are late. It seems we have lost the very sense of
time and its value.

It
is ironic, isn’t it, that most of us, particularly our Hindu brethren, go to an
astrologer to ask for the auspicious time, the muhurta, say, for solemnization of a marriage, but the band and the
dance on the street send everyone in such dodgy enthrallment that the barat is inordinately and shamelessly
late, to the stunning astonishment and discomfiture of the gharatis and the pundit who found out the muhurta, if he is present. Here, I must mention my uncle. It was
because of him that we reached the ‘gharatis’
good 15 minutes early! That was my wedding and that had ‘some’ effect on my
son’s wedding. Good 30 years thence, I succeeded in getting everything on time!
But I believe it is sheer Grace of God that men and women are able to keep
time.

I
find animals are far better. They follow time and Nature’s cycle naturally. For
men it is anytime! We are SOPHISTICATED!

We’ve
taken leave of time rather conveniently. But Time just won’t leave us. And,
that would be really inconvenient.